In the history of English intellectual development between the vague
ignorance of the Middle Ages and the new growth of learning in the
sixteenth century, stands the great figure of Chaucer. The first
English writer possessing dramatic power, he is the first also to unite
with the art of story-telling, the delineation and study of human
character. In his translation of the "Romaunt of the Rose" he belongs
to the Middle Ages,--a period of uncontrolled imagination, of
unsubstantial creations, of external appearances copied without
reflection. In his "Canterbury Tales" he belongs to the present,--when
Reason asserts her authority, gives the stamp of individual reality to
the characters of fiction, and studies the man himself behind his
outward and visible form.

The creations of romantic fiction were unreal beings distinguished by
different names, by the different insignia on their shields, and by the
degree in which they possessed the special qualities which formed the
ideal of mediæval times. The story of their lives was but a series of
adventures, strung together without plan, the overflow of an active but
ungoverned imagination. The pilgrims to the shrine of Canterbury are
men and women, genuine flesh and blood, as thoroughly individual and
distinct as the creations of Shakespeare and of Fielding. They dress,
they talk, each one after his own manner and according to his position
in life, telling a story appropriate to his disposition and suitable to
his experience. The knight, with armor battered in "mortal battailles"
with the Infidel, describes the adventures of Palamon and Arcite, a
tale of chivalry. The lusty young squire, bearing himself well, "in
hope to stonden in his lady grace," tells an Eastern tale of love and
romance. The prioress, "all conscience and tendre herte," relates the
legend of "litel flew of Lincoln," murdered by the Jews for singing his